Mosaic Law Research Articles

Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost" (review)

Reviewed by: Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost,” Gordon Teskey Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost,” by Jason P. Rosenblatt; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50. The epic project that includes the poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained marks the last occasion in Europe when the most ambitious literary form sought stability in theology rather than in philosophy. The philosophical poem, a minor form before the Enlightenment, became after Milton the general idea of what a great long poem should be. One thinks of Faust, naturally enough, where the triumph of philosophy over theology is enacted, of Coleridge’s youthful plans for a philosophical epic, and of Wordsworth’s qualified achievement of it in The Prelude. Hegel said that art, having been supplanted by philosophy as the discourse of truth, must be for us a thing of the past. A less striking but perhaps more accurate statement would be that the art that once sought stability in the knowledge of God now seeks it in the impersonal knowledge of truth. The Milton who, before Paradise Lost, composed for his own use a theological treatise in which every point made is anchored in scripture, belongs to an earlier age. Yet there are in him clear indications of what is to come. No poet before Milton is so preoccupied with metaphysical questions, with the ultimate nature of being and the causative principles governing creation. It is the theological Milton with which Jason P. Rosenblatt is concerned in this fine study of Paradise Lost, a study that is more controversial than is suggested by its title or by its eirenic scholarly tone. The book is an attack on what its author regards as the Pauline bias of Milton studies in the tradition of A. S. P. Woodhouse and Arthur Barker. It is a bias, persisting even in Miltonists who are unconcerned with theological questions, against Hebraism in general and the “Old Law” in particular, the system of law referred to as Torah. Expressed in positive terms, Rosenblatt’s aim is to show how Milton’s prose tracts of 1643–1645 (the tracts on divorce) are “the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of Paradise Lost” (p. ix), that is, of the books in which human beings are shown in the state of innocence, giving us a utopian model [End Page 546] of what we should strive for in our own lives. But the Hebraic ethos of Eden gives way in the later books of the epic, after the Fall, to a Pauline perspective where the Law is an evil that stands in the way of our freedom. Whereas Pauline theology condemns the Hebrew Law as a law of bondage, Torah, like the Tao, is a means to live freely in accord with the law of one’s nature. Such law is felt not as a restraint but as a path. Rosenblatt suggests that Paradise Lost is not the unified, orthodox Christian vision Woodhouse claimed it to be but a work that undergoes radical ideological change after the Fall, reenacting the historical change brought about by Christianity itself. In the 1640s Milton embarked on an arduous program of Hebraic studies, spurred on by his desire to recuperate the one Mosaic law Christ explicitly overturned: that permitting divorce for causes other than fornication, a word that, as Milton’s Satan says of another, bears no single sense. After the exaggerated assessments, earlier this century, of Milton’s Hebrew erudition an over-correction set in, asserting that because Milton resorted to secondary sources, reference works, and translations his Hebrew learning was shallow. But Milton never pretended to be a Hebrew or an Aramaic scholar. He knew the languages and used them to learn more, as he used and acknowledged the work of great scholars like Selden; and for an amateur his attainments were truly remarkable. Miltonists will value this book for its balanced, expert reassessment of the poet’s Hebrew learning. And it will be especially appreciated by Miltonists for the new insight it brings to the importance of the divorce tracts of the 1640s for the representation of human innocence in Paradise Lost. For most readers the book will be of interest as...

What Shall We Say that Abraham Found? The Controversy behind Romans 4

In Romans 4 Paul appealed to the precedent of the patriarch Abraham to argue three points on the basis of the Jewish scriptures. First, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham because of his faith and not because of his observance of the law (Rom 4:1–8); second, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham before Abraham's circumcision (4:9–12); and third, God's promise to Abraham and his “seed” came through faith, not through the Mosaic Law (4:13–17a). All three points are based on Paul's interpretation of Gen 15:6 and closely related texts. Paul appealed to Abraham in order to show that Abraham was meant to be the father not only of the circumcised but also of the uncircumcised (Rom 4:11–12,16–17). Paul also insisted that what was written about Abraham was meant not only for Abraham but also for those who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead (4:23–25).

Christian Reconstructionism and the Christian World Mission

Christian Reconstructionism is a movement which seeks to expand the kingdom of God in an external and institutional fashion. Advocates promote obedience to the Mosaic Law and seek to transform the political, economic, judicial, and social institutions of every nation into structures that would be modern equivalents of Old Testament Israel. For Reconstructionists, who are postmillennialists, this process fulfills the great commission. This essay shows that contrary to the missiological paradigm of Reconstructionism, the apostles of the New Testament operated in accordance with an internal and personal approach to salvation, allowing for culturally flexible philosophies of evangelism and discipleship which evangelicals should continue to appropriate for their outreach strategies.

Violence against parents in Swedish peasant society

Modern research has shown that western law in the Middle Ages was strongly influenced by Mosaic law. This influence became even stronger in Sweden when the theocratic monarchy and the orthodox clergy, by an addendum to the law, also introduced the death penalty of the Pentateuch for crimes against ‘the law of God’, including violence and verbal abuse against elderly parents. Since all prosecutions for crimes requiring the death penalty had to be tried in the court of appeal, the records of the appeal courts give an overall picture of the application of the law during a 250-year period. Prosecutions for crimes against parents increased during this period from just a few cases to a hundred per year. The death sentence was mitigated in the higher courts. The trend can be interpreted as an enforcement wave, but also as an expression of serious social unrest and economic conflicts in peasant society in the first half of the 19th century.

The Atmosphere of Election: Augustinianism as Common Sense

The Atmosphere of Election:Augustinianism as Common Sense* J. Patout Burns (bio) Augustine's teaching on gratuitous divine election, with its supporting doctrine of inherited guilt and necessary grace, challenged the established interpretation of Paul's teaching in the Western Church. These innovations quickly achieved widespread acceptance in Africa but were questioned or rejected in Italy and Gaul. The difference in response can be correlated with contrasting social settings of the churches. The continuing conflict between the Donatists and Catholics in the towns of Roman Africa over the efficacy of baptism and the necessity of belonging to the proper eucharistic communion created uncertainty about the functioning of the Christian economy of salvation. As a result, behavior was disconnected from salvific effects and God's governance appeared arbitrary. Under these conditions, a doctrine of election without regard to merit could take root and flourish. When Prosper wrote to Augustine in 429 to report on the opposition to his theory of predestination then solidifying in Provence, one charge detailed was that Augustine was reading the letter to the Romans in a way that no Christian had ever read it before, including its author and original addressees.1 Vincent of Lerins' principled denunciation would certainly have applied: this doctrine had not been taught always, everywhere, and by everyone.2 In a fifth-century perspective, Augustinianism was innovation or, more likely, aberration. Aberration, of course, occurs regularly, and some of it is recurrent. Innovation, however, takes hold; it addresses a new situation effectively [End Page 325] and designs the future. Paul's teaching on the Mosaic Law and the gospel of Christ provides an instance of innovation. The complex of ideas which comprise Augustine's theory of election—the inheritance of Adam's guilt, the impotence of fallen and even created nature, the necessity and gratuity of divine grace, divine control of human decisions—constitutes what can also be recognized as a genuine innovation. When Augustine was reborn in Christ, this was not Christian doctrine; by the time he died in Christ, most of it was generally accepted, at least in Africa.3 A hundred years later, it had begun to pass from doctrine to dogma, at least in the Western Church.4 Augustine's intellectual biography has been carefully researched. The genesis of his new reading of Romans and its elaboration into a coherent doctrine of divine operation have been chronicled. The inner workings of his intellectual development have been traced and the way one idea led to another and the whole was constructed has been mapped.5 Yet the very success of this intellectual history raises a different sort of question which cannot be answered by these techniques—why a radically new idea or worldview takes root and flourishes, while another remains tucked away in a treatise, waiting to be ferreted out centuries later and displayed as a curiosity. Augustine's theory of predestination was nearly such. He reached a new understanding of Romans in his response to Simplician's questions, finished about 396.6 He then used that reading to shape the narrative of conversion in the Confessions7 but otherwise said almost nothing about it for the next twenty years.8 Then during the last decade and a half of his life, he not only promoted but insisted on this radically different understanding of the relations between divine governance and human freedom. A whole segment of the Christian world, moreover, agreed with him. Augustine's own sudden shift might be explained in terms of some new intellectual development, such as the abandoning of the notion that the soul entered the earthly body by sinning, or the demands of [End Page 326] the controversy with the Donatists and Pelagians.9 But these hypotheses do not account for the idea taking hold in the North African church and spreading north across the Mediterranean. So the question of the social context of the doctrine of divine election forces itself forward: in what type of world would Augustinianism be plausible and become the common sense? The following analysis is totally dependent upon the theory of social organization proposed by the British cultural anthropologist, Mary Douglas.10 The reader will, however, be spared a full...

Romans 2.14–16: A Stoic Reading

Paul's problems with the law are notorious today; they were problematic in his own day too. Less notorious is Paul's view of nature. The two concepts come together in a unique passage in the Pauline corpus, one which seems to indicate that Paul knows of people, Gentiles no less, who do the law – though it is not certain what law – by nature. This contradicts much of what Paul says about Jewish inability to do the Mosaic law. I would like to argue, however, that Paul perceives this ability to do the law by nature as practically impossible. The basis for this argument is not a desire to save Paul from possible contradiction, but Stoic claims about the wise man, the only person capable of following the law of nature.

Christianity and Mosaic Law

Christianity and Mosaic Law

Levenspelgrimage of vrome wandeling? Claes Janszoon Visscher en zijn serie Plaisante Plaetsen

Levenspelgrimage of vrome wandeling? Claes Janszoon Visscher en zijn serie Plaisante Plaetsen

The gospel of St Matthew and the Mosaic law

(1992). The gospel of St Matthew and the Mosaic law. Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology: Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 109-120.

The doctrine of justification by faith in the early Catholic tradition

The doctrine of justification by faith in the Pauline writings was set within the context of Gentile-Jewish relations. It was used to explain how Gentiles could be part of God's people without first fulfilling the Mosaic Law. Early Catholic theologians continued to understand the significance of the doctrine in terms of Gentile-Jewish relations. The sixteenth-century Lutheran reformers used the teaching on justification by faith to answer another set of problems and questions. In doing so, however, they placed the doctrine within a setting very different from that of both the New Testament and the early Catholic Tradition.

Sacred Violence and the Curse of the Law (Galatians 3.13): The Death of Christ as a Sacrificial Travesty

The death of Christ has not been prominent in the significant recent debate about the centre of Paul's theology, between E. P. Sanders and H. Hübner. Sanders characterizes Paul's pattern of religion as a ‘participationist eschatology’ as compared to the ‘covenantal nomism’ of the contemporary Judaism. H. Hübner champions the centrality of ‘justification by faith’, over against a ‘mystical identification with the crucified and risen Christ’. The former comes from Luther, and the latter from Albert Schweitzer. Hübner says of Sanders' book that in several passages it sounds as if Schweitzerredivivuswere speaking. Sanders tends to make Paul's religion too intellectual — a change of world view, rather than a response to experience. Hübner does not take seriously enough the convincing evidence that Paul's problem with the Mosaic law was not the same as Luther's, namely that it promoted a ‘works righteousness’ which caused pride, but rather that in its social role as the guardian of the boundaries of the Jewish community, it excluded the Gentiles. Both, however, do not take the Cross seriously enough.

Thomas Aquinas and the Politics of Moses

In an oft-neglected section of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas undertakes a detailed, point-by-point comparison of the political regime prescribed by the Mosaic law with the teachings of the then recently translated Politics of Aristotle, thereby comparing the perspectives of faith and philosophy on political issues such as rulers, property, citizenship, and families. Because it organizes political affairs in light of the divine, Thomas concludes that the polity of the Old Testament is in fact the answer to the question concerning the best regime. Despite Christianity's view of the Mosaic law as abrogated, Thomas attempts to salvage the political wisdom of the Old Testament by arguing that the Mosaic regime can still serve as a guide for Christian political thinkers.

The land question answered from the Bible'; the land issue and the development of a Highland theology of Liberation

Abstract This paper considers the importance of the Bible in shaping the attitude of Highland people to social change in the nineteenth‐century Highlands. It looks particularly at the manner in which Biblical comparisons, derived principally from the Mosaic Law of the Old Testament, were utilised by crofters’ leaders to encourage action by the crofting population in the 1880s, when the Highland land agitation was at its peak. The roles of John Murdoch and the Rev. Donald MacCallum are examined. Their influence on clergy and laity is discussed. Modern parallels, especially Liberation Theology, are highlighted.

Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic Law

Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic Law

Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic Law

Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic Law

Uncovering a Major Source of Mosaic Law: The Evidence of Deut 21:15-22:5

Research Article| December 01 1982 Uncovering a Major Source of Mosaic Law: The Evidence of Deut 21:15-22:5 Calum M. Carmichael Calum M. Carmichael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (1982) 101 (4): 505–520. https://doi.org/10.2307/3260895 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Calum M. Carmichael; Uncovering a Major Source of Mosaic Law: The Evidence of Deut 21:15-22:5. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 December 1982; 101 (4): 505–520. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3260895 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 1982 Society of Biblical Literature1982 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Makers of Meaning: A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle

Makers of Meaning:A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle Anita Moss The central questions which structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists have asked have to do with the ways an active mind makes meaning. How do readers make sense of texts? How do human beings read and decipher the bewildering universe of signs in which they are immersed? How do conventions shape fictions; how do fictions shape our perceptions of reality? To make meaning from literary texts, structuralists argue, a reader must bring them within the modes of discourse which one's culture makes possible. Cultural conventions become after a time so thoroughly internalized that they appear to be natural. A central structuralist notion (deriving from the Russian formalist critics) concerns the force of genre conventions in establishing a reader's expectations, which may or may not be fulfilled by a given text. Central also to structuralist thought is the notion that making meaning results from the interplay of the signifier and the signified, the two components of what Saussure called the "sign." Though they had not heard of structuralism or semiotics, Mark Twain and E. Nesbit were intensely aware of the conventions of literature and of the power those conventions exercised on the minds of children. Both Twain and Nesbit reveal the child readers' attempts to use the conventions of literature in making sense of the world. Tom Sawyer's culture has taught him to live by the letter, not the spirit, of books. When Tom observes Aunt Polly at family worship, her "prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai."1 Tom's culture encourages him to accept the world of adult authority and rules without question: to obey, to use, to own, but not to think or to create. His culture encourages him to reduce all signs to simplistic, rather than full and rich, ways of making meaning. In Sunday School, he is asked to memorize and to recite endless passages from the Bible, to appropriate lifeless and rigid rules in which there is no room for meaningful "play" between signifier and signified, the field whereby human beings invent new meanings for themselves. To his credit and to the reader's delight, Tom signally fails to comply with these demands for rote learning. He fails to memorize Bible verses at church and he pretends at least to fail to memorize his lessons at school. If he has failed to master the surface substance of these lessons, however, Tom has internalized the method, the system by which his culture reads and makes use of texts. As a reader, Tom is disconcertingly literal-minded. In reading adventure stories and in employing their rules and "conventions" in his play, Tom reveals himself as an expert at the misuse of literature. We often use literary texts to establish our own power and authority over others; to manipulate them, and to make them like us. In his use of superstitious folk rituals, Tom is a stickler, indeed a pedant. He insists upon strict adherence to the rules and does not hesitate to use fallacious arguments to counter Huck's notions on the subject. Living in a community of readers who read and write strictly according to convention, Tom adopts their methods for his own purposes. Apparently Tom has not internalized structures which allow him to recombine experience and conventions in creative and liberating ways. Roland Barthes deplored contemporary French toys because they do not invite the child to "invent" his world.2 So it is with Tom. He is capable only of mechanical manipulation of convention. A voracious reader of adventure and romance, Tom uses the conventions of such literature as rituals for play. In these episodes he reveals that, despite his apparently subversive attitudes towards the major institutions of his society, he has nevertheless appropriated the "deep structures" (if not the surface ones) of his culture. He is authoritarian, arbitrary, and literal-minded in the conduct of this play. When his friends try to...

Moses and mycotoxins

Examples from the Pentateuch indicate that it had been recognized as early as the times of Moses that molds could present hazards to health and that simple yet effective preventive measures had been devised for protection from serious consequences of mycotoxins. Some of the Mosaic dietary prohibitions appear now as if they were designed for protection from mycotoxins, the production of which would be favored by the prevailing climatic conditions in the Middle East. The unusual circumstances that preceded the exodus of the ancient Hebrews from Egypt could have caused a proliferation of mycotoxins, which might have been involved in the plagues that afflicted the Egyptians. It is of interest that the Mosaic law forbids the consumption of carrion, the flesh of the omnivorous pig and certain other animals, the blood, and the abdominal fat from livestock and other animals that may sometimes be contaminated by mycotoxins. Recent epidemiological evidence implicating animal fats in certain cardiovascular diseases and cancers may be related to the occasional presence of lipophylic mycotoxins in the adipose tissues of animals, rather than to their physiological constituents, the saturated fatty acids and cholesterol.

The Prophet Hosea: God's Alternative to Divorce for the Reason of Infidelity

Christian divorce counseling requires a biblical perspective — an underlying knowledge of all that the Scriptures bring to bear on the subject. Basically, Jesus taught in answer to questions relating to the Mosaic Law, but He is not recorded as counseling a specific case of divorce (as in the instance of dealing with the woman taken in adultery). In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul responds to specific questions concerning specific cases. God's response to unfaithful Israel, His wife, is depicted in His directions to Hosea in view of Hosea's wife's infidelity. What really occurred is controverted. The thesis defended here is that God did not direct Hosea to divorce Gomer. Divorce is not the only or preferred solution to marital crisis involving infidelity. A counseling model is established, overlaid with the powerful reinforcement of God's own action.

The Bible and the Zoo in Andrey Sinyavsky's The Trial Begins

Biblical imagery plays an integral stylistic and thematic role in Andrey Sinyavsky's The Trial Begins. Simplified Old and New Testament concepts are used as focal points of allegory to expose the theology of the Soviet system and the sanctified person of Stalin. Through the use of such Biblical analogues as a prophet, the Fall, the Atonement, the Mosaic Law, the New Testament Gospel, the Promised Land, the scapegoat, and the account of Abraham and Isaac, Sinyavsky vents his dissident spleen against the excesses of an absolutist system's pursuit of the Great Goal. The system perceives itself as deified but fails because it does not possess the attributes of deity and because it runs amuck of an “end justifies the means” approach to implementation. To amplify his discussion of gods, victims, and sacrifices, Sinyavsky also utilizes animal imagery and focusses on the scapegoat and the prison‐like aura of the zoo. The Biblical conclusions of The Trial Begins indict the system from a New Testament perspective and expose the gospel, deities, and disciples as tragic imitations of ideal originals.